Yaletown

This guide to Yaletown in Vancouver starts in the 1850s at Yale, a Fraser Canyon gold-rush town so lawless it was called the wickedest little settlement in British Columbia, and follows what happened once the gold ran out and the Canadian Pacific Railway finished its line through town. It traces the 1887 move that brought Yale's rail workers, and its name, to tidal flats beside False Creek, and the decades of freight and grit that followed. Walk Hamilton and Mainland streets and look for the loading platforms and freight doors built for horse carts, not the restaurants that now fill them.